Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to return to Paris Photo with works by Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Elisheva Biernoff, Kota Ezawa, Martine Gutierrez, Peter Hujar, Richard Learoyd, Christian Marclay, Irving Penn, Carrie Mae Weems, and others. As part of Paris Photo’s Conversations series, on November 12 at 6:30pm, the fair will host Robert Adams: Three Friends, Three Perspectives, a talk featuring Sarah Greenough, Mitch Epstein, and Jeffrey Fraenkel on Adams’s work and character. On November 13 at 2pm, Liz Deschenes will sign her new monograph, Liz Deschenes: Works 2015–2026, at Radius Books’ booth. On November 14 at 3pm, Sophie Calle will sign À l’affût / On the Hunt at Atelier EXB’s booth. At 5pm she will sign Catalogue raisonné de l’inachevé at Actes Sud’s booth.
Irving Penn’s irregularly shaped fragment, above, appears both experimental and resolved. Created in the process of making larger platinum-palladium photographs, Penn stated that the fragments are “almost more interesting than the finished prints.”
Christian Marclay’s photograph turns one of London’s most ordinary street markings into a subject of sustained attention. Looking towards his feet and photographing the hand-painted instructions at a pedestrian crossing, Marclay’s series traces variations in lettering, wear, and weather.
This picture “shares elements with both the classical, the Renaissance, but also with pop culture,” says Richard Learoyd. “It straddles St. Sebastian and The Smiths.” Made with his room-size camera obscura, Learoyd’s recent work emphasizes the theatrical nature of his images. Learoyd notes, “It is real, a real boy, a real thorn, but not maybe real blood.”
Peter Hujar photographed Jerry Frankel, a musician and composer, draped casually across a chair in his loft at 189 2nd Avenue, where he created much of his best-known portrait work. The shoot was recorded in Hujar’s job books, which are transcribed in Peter Hujar: Contact, published by MACK and the Morgan Library & Museum in connection with the recent exhibition of the same name.
Kota Ezawa references Man Ray’s 1924 photograph Le Violon d’Ingres, which transforms the body of his model and romantic partner Kiki of Montparnasse into a musical instrument. Overlaying the photograph is Sonia Delaunay’s 1939 painting Rhythm Colour no. 1076, suggesting a layering of musical sources and evoking questions about female agency.
In a series of works titled Dress Up, Martine Gutierrez collages mixed media over her own nude self-portraits. Gutierrez draws inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, a beloved childhood parable. By fashioning herself in imagined apparel, Gutierrez explores how identity is made visible in both the physical body and the symbolic wardrobes we put on in order to perform and project who we are.
In her series Roaming, Weems serves as “an omniscient observer in the mode of the Rückenfigur, the trope identified with the early nineteenth-century German painter Caspar David Friedrich,” writes Franklin Sirmans in Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, the 2012 monograph which features this work on its cover. Weems created the series during her residency at the American Academy in Rome.
Against a white sky, the dry leaves of a young alder tree resemble lace or hieroglyphics. “What would account for the condition of the leaves,” Adams writes in Questions for an Overcast Day, a 2007 collection of photographs from the series. “Drought, insects, rocky ground, disease, herbicide, wind?”
Elisheva Biernoff’s tiny, to-scale paintings of vernacular photographs touch on shared experiences and often include some slightly remarkable or unusual aspect, or some type of photographic failure. Of Iris, Biernoff says, “I like the uncertainties of the photograph. I can’t tell if the man is a seminarian in a habit or a graduate in a hood; I can’t tell whether the bars of the fence intersect his cape because it has billowed behind, or if he has become transparent; I can’t tell if the temple is ancient or a neoclassical folly in a park. All I can tell is that there’s beauty in this strange spectral space, where everything is the wrong color.”
Diane Arbus photographed Hubert’s Museum, the storied Times Square dime museum, starting in the late 1950s. As the venue prepared to close, Arbus made a group portrait of performers, many of whom she had previously photographed. The image includes Congo the Jungle Creep, on the far left, and Charlie Lucas, manager of Hubert’s, at center, with his arm around Andy “Potato Chips” Ratoucheff, who appears in photographs including Russian midget friends in a living room on 100th Street, N.Y.C. 1963.
